Diagnostic reports generated as a result of medical procedure contain a wealth of information, comprising diagnostic imaging results, clinical history and annotations by healthcare professionals.
Radiologists typically process up to thirty cases per hour. When facing a challenging case, radiologists turn to information sources to complete the diagnosis. These information sources may include scientific publications, but most frequently include previous cases. For this reason, exemplary and interesting cases are collected in databases by the radiologists themselves. Such databases may take many forms: local folders on a computer system, accessible to individual users or to multiple users, PACS systems, a reference case manager like mypacs.net (www.mypacs.net).
These databases comprise many reports, by far exceeding the number of cases that any single person can recall. Even a personal folder, populated by one healthcare professional such as a radiologist, will typically grow beyond the point where its user can recall its full content. The problem is compounded by the access to databases of multiple users. For example, over 1 million diagnostic reports were generated in 1991-1996 by the Department of Radiology alone, and stored in the radiology information system (RIS) of the University of Texas Medical Branch. The ability to search the databases and retrieve relevant matches therefore becomes increasingly important. As medical imaging becomes more affordable, and the diversity of diagnostic modalities and therapeutic treatments increase, the amount of data being stored increases, and the problem becomes even more critical.